123005-is-wildstar-for-me
Content ---- ---- Sorry to hear you didn't like Whitevale or Farside, but you have to understand that a lot of us really enjoyed things like Farside. I thought the squirg questline was very well done, the Ikthian chapter epic, and the only downside that the surface of the moon was PACKED with stuff, which I wouldn't expect from a lunar surface. You also have to understand that the story continues across zones, since they sort of can. The Dorian Walker line continues in the next zone (Wilderrun) and he shows up fairly often throughout the rest of the leveling experience. The same goes for Belle Walker, Deadeye Brightland, and Durek Stonebreaker, all of whom continue to recur throughout the story. Rolling Dominion may change some of the story, though the quests are often very similar beyond Whitevale since they occur in the same areas. I couldn't disagree more with the combat being boring especially the "elites" (I think you're referring to Primes, which have actually had two threads made by someone who thought they were so impossible to deal with that they should be removed from the game). Having to crank up your interrupts to break the armor while sacrificing your damage is a pretty common choice you have to make, especially when it takes three interrupts to break your average prime. Still, maybe you're just bored at your level; it's entirely possible. Mix in some group play and run with a guild group for premades. Or, if you're really bored with a zone and combat is too easy for you, just skip the rest of the zone and start the next. Or work a different class if you're getting bored with Stalker. Classes like Engineers have more variety within their DPS builds. Considering how the other MMORPGs are, and I've played a few, if Wildstar is schizophrenic and entertaining enough, you aren't going to find a step up in games like WoW, EVE, or FFXIV:ARR. They're great games, but they're all quite a bit slower, quite a bit more relaxed, and the quest mobs are DEFINITELY less threatening. I suppose I'm not sure what other options there are if the combat being slow and boring is your complaint. | |} ---- ---- ---- I love being on my explorer! I think that was the biggest draw to the game for me right after the instances. I cut my teeth on classic platforming games when I was a kid, I played them all the way up to my college years, when they stopped really making platformers for the PC. Then Steam came, and I had a diversion from my MMORPG gaming where I could play some old school platforming. Wildstar is both an MMORPG and a great platformer. People ask what I do in housing all day. One of them is to drop by my plot challenges on all my characters. My Stalker/Explorer has the Gold Rush and Shardspire Canyon challenges on them. Those never get old! | |} ---- ---- My main problem was that while leveling I found combat quite boring on a stalker and the story aspect had been weak (in my opinion) for a while. The later is probably due to that I didn't do Whitevale quests in order and the beginning of Farside (which I have not completed yet). On the other hand, the game has shown me it was quite capable of providing with stories I like and I did praise group combat. I am also quite fond of the platforming offered as an explorer (I am just sad there is not more of it). I got some piece of information, like Dominion being similar to Exile starting at Farside and engineers having more damage dealing variety. That's the kind of information I am looking for. People that played stalkers/Exiles sharing comparisons with alternatives. Regards, Lloyd Shade | |} ---- I actually have played all the classes. Maybe a change of class is in order. Who knows? I can give you a down-and-dirty, bare-bones description: Stalker you know. Warrior is my main class. It's rougher and more rugged than Stalker, and can be compared in a few ways to a WoW warrior (building resource from using abilities, then blowing through that resource with other abilities). It's a lot less subtle, a lot less bursty, and probably the outright nastiest DPS in the game at this point after about three seconds. You can also handle more mobs at once because of your heavier armor and the more sweeping attacks warriors tend to make. I highly recommend them in case Stalker feels too choppy for you. Medic is actually a "melee" class, at least in the sense that most of their attacks are only medium range at best and many have wide sweeping arcs. They're actually a lot of fun, and if you've never played one, they aren't what you'd think they are (the strange thing about them is that they're not what anyone expects them to be). I've had a blast playing mine, especially in DPS. They really come into their own as a healing class, though, because if you like support roles but feel bored standing in the back, medic healers are generally standing right there with the tank dodging the exact same stuff (and requiring their fellow groupmates to be likewise close). Engineers are ranged classes generally (though they also tank). They're one of the weirder classes to play because of how much thought you have to put into ranges, splashes, and status effects. I like playing mine, though it's a very different experience solo. You have to constantly be monitoring your bots because, in vanilla WoW fashion, they can pull aggro following you at a different level than you're on. I can recommend them, though, they're fun. Spellslingers are my other level 50 class and probably my second favorite. Of the two light armor classes, they are a lot faster, a lot blitzier, and a lot more twitchy. I love them to pieces, though! They tend to parse at the bottom of overall raids just because the skill required to max them is so high and even then they need so much complexity at the controls that you'll never catch a warrior in an open fight. However, they're exceptionally popular because they're exceptionally fun to play. They're highly mobile, so you need to know and plan where you're dodging and slipping as you go. I can't speak to their healing, though; I've never done it. Espers are conversely my least favorite class. Though mobile, they have casting times on their spells, at least a lot more than Spellslingers. A lot of their play is proactive rather than reactive, you get little spawnable tanks, slow build ups, DOTs, et al. Sometimes, you can pull some fun abilities like firing up Blade Dance, but the class is still a little slow and low for my personal preferences. They're also very popular, though, so that's just personal opinion. I'm sure someone can better educate you on Espers. My pocket healer is an Esper, and while they have a lot more cast times, they are very good healers if you're looking for raw green numbers. It can be a little more challenging to aim right since you have so many cast times and charges to handle, though. I don't know if any of that helps you more. | |} ---- ---- ---- Really? I hate the sort of fragmentation of the environments that happen in games like SWTOR, WoW Cataclysm, etc. I like my experience to transition from one area to the next, and to get a sort of physical relationship of what places are where. Coming back to this game, I remembered where most zones were in relationship to each other within the same continent, but since too many zones are isolated, I often find myself having to ask how to even get to zone X or Y because I don't have a spatial link between them - I just randomly get moved from one place to another by some random transportation NPC. Completely immersion breaking and pulls me out of the game (not to mention that most transportation goes out of your primary hubs, you don't get a mental link even in the case of the dark portal connecting to outland or draenor). | |} ---- ---- I understand if you don't like filler damage, but I haven't hit the tab key (or anything like it) since I started. I think a few Esper abilities are tab-targeted, but unless you count my Warrior's polarity field when tanking, there is no tab-targeting. It's not as fast as something like Ninja Gaiden, but it's easily the outright quickest MMORPG I've ever played. It certainly demands a lot more from your reactions than any other MMORPG I've ever played. I suppose I just don't see where that idea comes from. WoW is a tab-targeted game, Wildstar's combat couldn't be any more different than that if they removed attacks altogether. EVE Online's combat has more in common with WoW's than Wildstar's. | |} ---- The feel of the gameplay. When you've played tons of true action games like God of War, Devil May Cry, Metal Gear Rising, and Darksiders, and beaten those games 'flawlessly', and then on the flip side played MMOs like WoW, SWTOR, you just understand why one lumps Wildstar in with MMOs rather than action games - because it is an MMO, and not an action game. If you go into the game expecting that if you play perfectly, you will never get hit, and then you play Wildstar and get killed by auto-attacks from some Prime mob, that is going to bum you out. But once you understand that a Prime is an Elite, and like most MMOs, you don't want to take an Elite on by yourself, or at the very least not unless you're highly geared, you can have a lot more realistic expectations and from there have more fun based on those expectations. The problem is that if you buy into the hype, and you look at all these shiny telegrahs, you get the wrong impression. MMOs can be just as fun as action games in their own way, but you have to go into them with the right set of expectations. | |} ---- ---- Don't underestimate the power of such a simple statement. I leveled a SS to 50, and it was....ok. I thought it was enjoyable. But it isn't until I've just now returned and finally tried an esper that I realize how wrong I was. For me, Esper is LIGHTYEARS ahead of the SS I used to play. So much more fun! Give it a shot, and try several other classes for 10 levels or so. I've wondered more than a few times what WIldstar would be like without those cheesy auto-attacks. I'd like to think it would be better, since a skilled player really COULD take on anything if they were good enough. But then again, it might ruin the overall experience of the game too. Who knows? | |} ---- So you're comparing Wildstar not to MMORPGs, but to games like Ninja Gaiden. I guess that makes more sense. Wildstar is probably the fastest MMORPG I've ever played, not the fastest game. That makes sense... it is an MMORPG. As a solo action game, it wouldn't be the fastest game in the genre, but that's not what it is. It'd be a bit like complaining about the lack of weapon variety because it's nothing like F19sf. I mean, that's pretty clear, it's an MMORPG, not a flight combat simulator. Wildstar's just an action MMORPG. It has more in common with the newer 3d Zelda games than Devil May Cry. If you're making that comparison, that'd make a lot of sense. It's not as fast as Devil May Cry. That's a completely different kind of game and genre. Definitely, people shouldn't get into this game expecting Team Ninja fast gameplay. There's no way that works in a game like Wildstar or any MMORPG; Wildstar already suffers at moderate to high lag at the speed it goes, Devil May Cry staccato speed would mean that a player on a 100+ms connection would see mobs dead or flickering around the screen. Granted, in Wildstar, you have to routinely dodge telegraphs on a second's delay or less. It's not like it's lumbering. | |} ---- Definitely. One of the reasons I play all the classes (even have my Esper at 36) is because sometimes the mood just strikes me to play a different class. Variety is the spice of life, and even if you love your Warrior to death, sometimes you just feel like playing a Spellslinger. | |} ---- Well, he got to Farside, level 31 and feels bored by the current content. I'm taking his post as a question "does it get any better/is it different from here on out?". Fair question for the community I think. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- ----